Tradurre i classici: l’opera di Pietro Tripodo, “Semicerchio”, 62 (2020/01)

ROBERTA ALVITI

«S’io fossi poeta, / un poeta gentile, canterei / per gli occhi vostri un sì puro cantare / quale, sul marmo bianco, l’acqua limpida»: Pietro Tripodo traduce Antonio Machado

Università degli Studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale,  r.alviti@unicas.it

The essay focuses on Pietro Tripodo’s translation of sixteen poems by Antonio Machado, one of the most important names of twentieth-century Spanish poetry.

The aim of the essay is to analyse the translation strategies that Tripodo employed to set up his Italian version. As a matter of fact, Tripodo’s rifacimenti are the result of a careful work of philological excavation, interpretation and appropriation of Machado’s poems, according to his intention to reproduce at least the rhythmic pattern of the original text, with its various line measures and its arrangement of stanzas.

ANNA BELOZOROVICH

Sapienza Università di Roma, DSEAI, anna.belozorovich@uniroma1.it

The article analyzes the writings of Kazimir Malevich and the self-translation processes found between texts of a philosophical nature and his poetry. The analysis is based on three texts written between 1916 and 1918, the first being a note followed by two poems. All three texts deal with themes that are peculiar of Malevich’s

philosophical reflection, such as the widening of consciousness and detachment from the earth. The significant analogies that emerge between the texts allow to observe mainly two phenomena: on the one hand, the content exposed in the note migrates into the poem reacting to its formal structure. Versification therefore generates a distribution of contents that has its own expressive power. Secondly, the transfer of reflection from essay to poem allows the content itself to undergo changes and to evolve. The analysis suggests that the poetic form may represent a fertile space for the development of Malevich’s philosophical thought.

ALICE CENCETTI

Università degli Studi di Firenze, cencettialice@libero.it

This essay analyses the relationship between Pietro Tripodo and Giovanni Pascoli’s Latin poetry. Particular attention was paid to his unpublished translation of  Pascoli’s “Catullocalvos”. Its main peculiarities (love and a deep interest in language) arise here also from a comparison with the remakes of the Latin Epigrams by the poet from Romagna in Tripodo’s “Other visions”.

ELEONORA RIMOLO

Università degli Studi di Salerno, eleonorarimolo@gmail.com

The essay analyses some remakes of classical texts by Pietro Tripodo. The style is high and the poet chooses words that are very sought after and not commonly used, mostly of Latin ancestry: everything, however, is linked to a process of remaking. In addition to the rewriting of Horace’s Carme I, XI in Altre visioni, four unpublished texts by Tripod, belonging to an unpublished collection entitled Flora, which is kept by Ignazio Visco, a friend of the poet, are going to be analysed: Horace’s Carme I, IX ad Thaliarcum, the epigram XVIII ad uxorem by Ausonio and Catullus’ carmina XCVI ET LXXII. The encounter between the language of Tripod and the classical language is a real collision of crossreferences and references that stratify creating a third language, alienating but involving; it manages to bring the reader from the starting text to the one of arrival preserving the classical atmospheres but succeeding in placing them in a corrupted contemporaneity, which has emptied the myth and denied the classical.

NICCOLÒ SCAFFAI

Università di Siena, DFCLAM, niccolo.scaffai@unisi.it

Pietro Tripodo (Rome, 1948-1999) was a poet and translator of some of the most important authors of ancient, medieval and modern tradition such as Callimachus, Catullus, Horace, Arnaut Daniel, Trakl, George, Valéry. The four essays in the dossier published in this issue all focus on Tripod’s translations from different languages and poets and in all cases the analysis has extended from linguistic facts to the literary relationship and creative processes that oversee the remakes as well as Tripod’s writing with or without verse. Eleonora Rimolo’s essay focuses on translations and Tripod’s relationship with classical culture; Alice Cencetti’s essay is dedicated to translations from Pascoli’s Latin works; Zeno Verlato’s essay examines translations by Arnaut Daniel; finally, Roberta Alviti’s essay contains an in-depth analysis of Tripod’s translations by Antonio Machado.

ZENO VERLATO

CNR-Istituto Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI), verlato@ovi.cnr.it

In 1997, Pietro Tripodo published his translation of the troubadour Arnaut Daniel’s poems, a few months before the worsening of the illness that led him to a

premature death. As the present essay aims to show, such publication of Arnaut’s production was the last phase of Tripodo’s relentless engagement with translation, which proceeded in parallel with his commitment as a poet. Translation, in the economy of Tripodo’s oeuvre, was, in fact, a rifacimento (‘remake’) and played a key role in defining poetry as the embodiment of atemporal formal values. This was, probably, a consequence of his musings on Paul Valéry’s poetics. My essay will demonstrate, through a comparison with a different translation of Arnaut published a few years later by the poet Fernando Bandini, the specificity of Tripodo’s work. Finally, my paper will show, through an analysis of the relationship between the translation of Arnaut and the collection of lyrical prose Vampe del tempo, the last that Tripodo published, how Tripodo’s activity as a translator deeply contributed to the formation of his language and poetic style.